Monday, April 5, 2010

Dj A.I. Industry Review

Wackness! Most of Hip-Hop has been crafted around making up new things to try to describe or relate to the world around us. Wackness! Yes this is not really a word in Websters. It is a created word to help my culture relate to what the music industry is. The unfortunate side of the music industry today is that this so called wackness is not solely driven by the major record labels and MTV as it was in the past. Most of the junk we encounter in Hip-Hop today comes from emcees and beat makers who really have no musical interest other than the attention and money. They produce beats to sound just like current hits of today. I do agree that producers should stay up on how to keep your sound up-to-date, but understand that production is diffent than composition. We now have thousands of emcees who all say that they offer something fresh in thier songs. Again I do think that your sound quality should match todays standards but your rhyme composition should be your own. They say you should know where you've been to know where your going. Let's take a minuite then to look back on people who made REAL changes in our world. Musically the system we use in music today was developed by J.S. Bach. During his time most people did not like his music or his theories. Did this stop his from doing what he wanted? NO. The result is something that stood the test of time and his music just as relevant today as it was at any point in time. Miles Davis, a man who redefined Jazz several times throughout his career. When Bitches Brew hit most Jazz critics were displeased with where he was taking jazz. I have even heard comments to the effect that because of his reputation and influence he ruined jazz because of this. The point is that both artists did not change their sound to fit with what others thought it should be. When you follow templates and replications of other work you lose some creativity to have a model someone else did, not your own, so while you are creating your only doing so inside a structure someone else created. Charlie Parker wrote a ton of tunes but most of those were fleshed out over existing chord patterns already done. When Miles issued 'Kind Of Blue' (the best selling jazz albumn of all time) he, in a sense, created a whole new structure to work with. There are so many people in the music industry today afraid to make the leap into the unknown. I also lay a bit of the blame on our society in North America. We are very obsessed with what the product looks like but don't really concern ourselves with what the product is. What we need now is strong artists who will work through the tough times, and also a bit of help from our government. Look at the European treatment of artists, they allow support of artists to create and not put something that you cannot quantify into an open market to whore away our skills and celestial offerings.